Personally I think that India is quite cool; but it would never enter my head in a million years to do business where any Indian official could screw things up. Maybe I am completely wrong but this is the perception of every business person I know including Indians who regularly navigate those dangerous waters.
India regularly complains that they don't get any respect from the western business world who only want to sell their products in India from afar. It makes me wonder what kind of powerhouse India could be if there wasn't this ever present threat that either a corrupt official (at any one of the 10,000 government departments) will demand a bribe, or the ever present threat that a local competitor will use officialdom to shut you out of the Indian market.
If it is this bad for outsiders how terrible is it for Indians who manage to have some success?
I had an idea for a book (that I'd probably never write) where a Canadian spy service turned out to be one of the worst offenders for international assholery. The basic premise was that nobody would think of Canada as a bunch of meddling douch-nozzles; and then damn it turns out we are.
The whole stupid thing is that if you were to add up all the value that Canada has received from our super spy stuff that it would pale in comparison to the damage that has been done to our international reputation. How many companies won't deal with us? How many countries don't view us as fairplay sorts of people? How many countries are now going to think, "If Canada is even doing it then so should we."?
If it turns out that the spies were stopping a James Bond level supervillain every month or so then it might have been worth it. But my guess is that the sum total was that other spy agencies fed crap information to us combines with their discovery that people who they knew were bad, were, in fact, bad.
But the premise of my book being that Canadian's could wander the globe un-molested (except for the 2 minutes that people thought they were Americans) is now in the crapper. Prior to recent events I suspect that a Canadian who wandered into North Korea could potentially be believed that he thought that South Korea was the one he wasn't allowed to do and then before he was released organize a mining contract with the government.
I think the physical world version is when developers build crap houses during a housing boom. Leaky roofs, crap foundations, cheap hardware, shoddy workmanship, often even crossing the line into bribing building inspectors to allow even legal corners to be cut. But in the hysteria of the boom the shoddy developer will make far far far more money than the craftsmen. The price for this crap workmanship is often only paid during the downturn when the people who bought the crap houses have a very hard time maintaining them and selling them.
So it all depends on the timing and this is where fast and shoddy is potentially an asset. If you realize what the market needs right this second and produce it right this second then you will start to scoop customers by the boatload. Then (unlike houses) you can go back and rebuild properly. I have heard that the programmers at Google complain about the crap original code that the founders did. The Twitter code was crappy ruby and then replaced. I suspect that even things like Youtube was crap but then replaced. Reddit was done in lisp and then replaced in something like 24 hours in python.
But if your product is not all about timing, say building an upgraded POS(point of sale, not piece of sh..) system for a store then craftsmanship should probably be rule one.
By better I meant more money. Many of the top websites out there have done emergency rewrites a their weak code failed under load. But I suspect that if they had carefully crafted their code "properly" from the start they would have been late to market, run out of money, or culled critical(to their success) features to meet various deadlines. The damn the torpedoes approach might not appeal to the craftsmen in many of us but if you simply use the score of how many dollars it generates then poor code has a horrible habit of scoring quite well.
I can just see the courses my school would have offered. Textbooks full of code that is bug ridden. Teachers that would not understand advanced programming and thus penalize awesome programmers that "colored outside the lines" and used advanced programming. I could see some student using a singleton instead of a global and having the teacher say "Wrong a global would have been cleaner." Even if you hate singletons, global are worse.
Then I could see the technology becoming either a buzzword bingo or really dated. So it would be intro to perl, visual basic, and power builder. Or an intro to node.js, ruby, and haskell.
But the second worst upon worst would be that companies would "freely" donate to the school system so that the kids would become little MSDN/Oracle/Salesforce drones.
The worst of worst would be that they would suck all the fun out of it; Every single drop. So instead of teaching them something relevant such as making a video game, an Arduino robot, or creating a tool for interacting with pintrest/twiter/vine etc. They would have them doing the age old command line enter your age and find out how old you are in dog years crap.
I have watched my nephews making crap in Unity3D and they are forcing themselves to learn programming. Much is copy and paste code then hammer it until it works. This is not going to create a firm foundation but if after this they took a rapid introduction to programming course that showed them how to do things correctly they would realize that many of their bad habits had a cure. But they wouldn't have to learn the underlying philosophy that makes you really grok programming which is something that most intro courses completely fail at. I have talked to many people who have just passed a university programming course and they usually don't know the difference between a float and an int. (Usually Java based courses so they should know).
I'm not saying that CS in highschool is a bad idea but that CS is for a certain type of person. You either love it or it is purely a chore. It seems that the goal is to expose tonnes of people to CS and hope that a few end up joining our little cult. So my suggestion is to create for credit computer/engineering clubs. The idea would be to have the tools and a mentor who would encourage independent study and small group projects. This way someone who has been doing Arduino assembly since grade 8 would be able to attempt something fantastic while someone else who had failed to compile Hello World and still loved it would also have a place that welcomed them. Trying to have a standard curriculum is just going to annoy everybody and only result in wasted time and tears; and maybe even a worse outcome as the person who wants to make an app is just going to get pissed off writing the usual command line garbage. Personally I would much rather make a crappy buggy app than a perfect command line thing on my first go.
A bit of Hollywood history is that the movie industry was born from the movie people wanting to get away from the abusive patents that gave control to this new and expanding industry to a few east coast barons.
So we can see what happens when you have an industry that is "protected" by patents and the identical industry that isn't.
People argue that without patents nobody would invent anything. But in a rapidly expanding and growing industry people aren't inventing for the sake of inventing but solving problems that are completely obvious in their solution the moment any halfway decent engineer stumbles upon them.
I suspect that another key problem with ethics is that many evil things are more fun to do, think about, and tell people than the boring things. If you tell people that you are an HVAC engineer they will think, "BORING!!!" yet the reality is that you make many poeples' lives more comfortable, and with good designs, save energy, and create healthy environments. But if you tell people you are the inventor of the hellfire missile or build nuclear bombs then they will go, "oooooooh"
I'm not sure there is any limit to the "coolness" of what is effectively sociopathic behavior; If you tell tech people that you are building a military robot that is designed to hunt and then jump onto the faces of the Taliban (alien style) and stuff a GPS tracker/grenade down their throat that forces them to surrender or be blown up from the inside then you will make headline news. If you develop a way to make cheap home wiring that conducts better than silver you are back to boring.
The above evil will get a few people to gasp in horror but most people will want to know more.
Now normally the defense industry goes through spasms of peace and the engineers face huge layoffs. But this time around the US is effectively doing a War on Fear which will pretty well never end. So if you can invent a tool for annihilating the boogy man then you will remain solidly employed. I you are inventing somethings solar that reduces fossil fuel use then your employment will be fitful at best.
I have seen leaked code from many very successful products. Typically it is shoddy and full of security holes (hence why it was public) yet the companies behind it were and generally are doing quite well. Personally I am a fussy about making my products solid and secure; but I hate to say it but quick and dirty makes for a better business model.
So as many people have advised, document your worries, but even better find the various security problems and come up with a solid recovery plan. Then when the day comes and things go to hell you will be able to save the day. The only thing to do with your documents is not to play the blame game ( you will lose to some MBA asshole who will take you out before you can do any damage to his career) but to be able to show the MBA looking for a scapegoat that you aren't going to be easy prey and for them to find some other person to blame.
So in the end you will be a hero, not a scapegoat, and will have all the resources to fix everything for a while at least. What you will never be is vindicated.
Theoretically in a large organization with a huge and demanding application allowing developers to be able to interface with some sort of API with whatever language they choose may seem like a very flexible solution. I would be very worried that after a few years your code base would not only include a broad spectrum of languages but even potentially a broad spectrum of versions of those languages.
I suspect that you would find yourself having to learn Haskell for one emergency and Erlang for the next.
Where a multi language compatible API would be great though is when you start to migrate your system from one language to another. If you could do it piece by piece deploying each small well tested piece before moving on to the next I would suspect that many a disaster would be avoided.
I am not saying that spotify money is enough. If anything it sounds like they are just another group exploiting artists but if I understand they are still a goldmine compared to radio. These artists are saying that they got some crappy little payment for 1 MILLION listens making it seem like they were ripped off and that 1 million is a huge number. But 1 million would be a normal number listening to a NY radio station at primetime and the same artist would be all chuffed that they are in a NY radio station's prime time rotation. But that radio station would be paying peanuts for that.
I suspect that this is why some of the more "successful" (I'm not saying good) artists just tour tour tour and can barely be bothered to politic their way in to the top 10 charts. This way they have much more control over the money. If some promoter tries to set up a concert where the artist is getting shafted then they just won't show up. Worst case contractually they will just get "laryngitis".
I have read an interesting thing about iTunes though. Many dead music libraries from decades ago suddenly became viable with iTunes. Some artists who charted in the 60's and 70's said, "I haven't had a royalty check in 15 years even though I hear my stuff on radio every now and then. But after I put my stuff on iTunes I'm now getting around $30,000 a year."
So one of the things with Spotify being ragged on by the artists might come from the fact that the numbers are presented to the artist making it clear that they aren't getting much money. Whereas their other distribution channels are much cloudier so they don't know how badly they are being screwed.
Quite simply information is power. Governments might claim (and potentially truthfully) that they won't abuse this power; but it is power that they have quite simply grabbed without much debate. On the otherhand we the people are denied much information about government with them saying that it would be a security issue to hand out much of the most powerful information. So why is it that minor nobodies with little or no oversight can go through my most personal banking, telephoning, and medical information while the most basic information such as the exact details of how government officials are spending my money are hidden.
Few if any freedom of information laws have real teeth and governments push back against them as hard as is possible with outlandish fees, redacted information, delays, byzantine application and appeals processes, and in the end no consequences if they obstruct or don't comply. Let's see what happens when the government demands information from you and you start hitting them with per page fees, redacting information, or just saying no.
I have a simple suggestion: that laws be put into place that severely limit the government's ability to gather information about us. And another set of laws that give the public pretty well open and near total access to any government record. The only records that should be "secret" are ones where the harm greatly outweighs the public good and even then there could be time limits. Two examples would be a few things involving criminal investigations such as informants, undercover officers, wiretaps, etc. The other would be individual medical records as people would otherwise be reluctant to seek treatment for embarrassing conditions or at least be honest with their doctor.
But severely limiting the government would almost certainly result in their doing an end run and using private organizations to do their spying. So the law would have to reach out and limit any organization from gathering or sharing data. A simple example that I would love to see is that a company would not be allowed to disseminate/sell data even in the aggregate that they gathered for a specific purpose beyond that purpose. So if a contest gets your name they can use it for picking a winner, not for further marketing. If the power company gets your address they can hook you up and send you bills. If the credit card companies see you make a purchase they can bill you for it but that is it. A critical part of such a law would be that a contract can not depend upon someone waving that right, nor can their be negative option waivers.
A simple way to formulate this law would be to find out the various data sources that junk mailers use and make them all illegal; that plus a bit of common sense would make for an awesome life improving law.
One of the interesting test results is if you should avoid certain things such as opiates(due to a propensity to become addicted) , malaria, etc. You might think that you should avoid those anyway but it allows you to simply say after back surgery, "I don't want any opiate based drugs so as to avoid becoming dependent" and with travel plans you would doubly avoid countries with even fairly low levels of malaria. So Italy instead of Costa Rica. Not exactly home surgery but allows you to make your own informed choices for $99.
I can't imagine what the same bevy of tests would cost at my family doctor? I am going to throw out that it would be no less than $1,000 to end up with the same results.
I am 100% sure that this is because 23 and me are cutting out layer upon layer of the traditional health network. Cable would shut down Netflix if they could claim "It's for the children" like the health industry can.
Off the top of my head the layers cut out would include: Doctors, HMOs, Lab techs, companies that distribute the tests, the companies that make the tests, and most importantly the various government departments that deal with all these people. It is not like 23 and me are going to destroy traditional medicine but the last thing that the health industry wants are for their "customers" to grow comfortable going to cheap efficient companies for their medical needs.
I think the funny thing is that the 100,000 to 1 ratio works out about perfectly on a per minute basis; that is one accident per 100,000 minutes of operation. I think that challenger flew for a tad over 90,000 minutes. Then with Columbia they "vastly" improved safety and got it to fly for 400,000 minutes.
Bureaucrats are comfortable generating reality. To a large extent this becomes their job; if you are in charge of an environmental clean up you will move the goalposts around to match what you can do, and if you can't even meet these mutable goals you figure out a way to measure it so that the result are met. Plus you take any reports that indicate failure and "massage" them until they look good; and if the underlings who create these horrible truths won't shut up you punish them or just get rid of them.
This works well when the facts are a bit fuzzy and you are able to control the flow of information to your superiors and ideally the public. The problem is that the skillset that enables these people to survive and thrive in a bureaucracy aren't the skills required to deliver a functioning and realistic test passing product. So you have a product such as healthcare.gov which is going to be wildly exposed to the public and the scrutiny of people you can't control (the press and political opposition) and oddly enough it blows up.
People look at the hard numbers and say this is a pile of crap that doesn't work. Yet I am willing to bet two key things are happening:
One is that there are reports flowing up to the top people (who don't understand technology) that are a combination of saying that it works far better than the "detractors" are claiming while simultaniously blaming some other party with lesser abilities to communicate with said superiors.
And two that the company that won this contract is awesome at participating in this reality distorting circlejerk. I bet that the reports and other paperwork was Washington gold; the product of top-of-the-class-MBAs. People for whom facts are not only to be ignored but to be looked at with suspicion and hostility.
So the question of which development style should have been used or which technology was best are nearly moot; in that every choice would have been made based upon the criteria of "It must look good in a report"
I suspect that the only lesson learned from this in Washington is that if you love your career that you should not get involved in a project that involves a measurable end product that is delivered to the public.
The various opposition groups will probably try to score various points based upon actual facts such as cronyism and poor testing but the reality is that 5 minutes into getting power they would hand a similar project over to their insider friends and primarily demand good paperwork over an actual product.
So to prevent this type of disaster you can't look at say agile practices in software but maybe agile type practices within government itself.
I agree but the key mistake is that they are trying to build electric cars that replace cars. My theory is to build an electric car for weirdos; people who don't drive much or when they do drive are driving a very very predictable pattern that falls well within a cheaper electric. You mention that a road trip would be a 10% problem. But for a two car house with one car electric and commuting and the other for more "normal" driving this would not be a problem.
The gas turbine bump thing is a problem with larger gas turbines. Smaller ones can take advantage of things such as air bearings that are exceptional at taking bumps. But again this is where they are building normal cars with an electric twist. Jag tested a car with a 90hp turbine that was enough to sustain highway speeds. I don't want that big a thing but a turbine to get me out of trouble; hence 5hp or so. I am perfectly happy to discover that my car won't get me home unless I pull over and recharge for an hour. So I pull over and read a book. This would happen infrequently but it would be less costly than a tow and take about the same time.
Right now electric cars are for very specific people who have fairly specific needs plus they are missing critical features.
There are two sorts of people who can use a modern electric car: People who commute well within a basic battery range (less than 100km round trip) and the other are people like me who live downtown and mostly need a car to avoid using the terrible bus system or bike in bad weather.
Quite simply it is impossible to build a reasonably priced electric car that can match a gasoline car so the simple solution is to not bother. So if you make a case to the less than 100km round trip commuter that they will basically never buy gas for their commuting again then you will have their attention.
If you tell me as a very infrequent driver and generally short trip driver that I will never buy gas again then you will have my attention.
But if you lie to me and tell me that electric is basically the same as a gas car then I will call BS and you won't have my attention.
On top of all that there are a few bad design decisions. First is they keep trying to put too big a battery in the cars; this is just stupid until batteries get cheaper and better. Just meet the average commuter's needs for a round trip with margin and you will sell them a car. The next design disaster is when they try to simulate a real gas car by putting a piston engine in as in the volt. The best solution would be to have a low power gas turbine (5-10hp) that can charge the car's battery slowly. This way you eliminate range anxiety by allowing the person to realize that they don't have enough juice to complete the journey so they kick in the turbine (or automatically when they set a destination that is beyond the battery's range) which will buy more range. If the turbine doesn't provide enough immediate range the driver could pull over and get a coffee while the turbine adds a mile of range every minute or two.
Then you roof the car in solar so that the battery is charging during sunny days. For a commuter this would be great as they might use 30% of their charge getting to work and come out having recovered 10%. Then when they get home they would get an hour or two more charging not quite topping them up but reducing their electrical bill.
For an occasional user like me a solar roof might mean that my battery is nearly always charged as it should get topped off most sunny days.
Lastly there are all kinds of engineering gaps in these cars. One interesting one is heating in colder climates. In the winter around here a smaller battery would be eaten just keeping me warm, especially if I am waiting in the car. One simple solution would be to have an alcohol heater which would be simple and single purposed for keeping me warm. This would be great if you could turn it on 10 minutes before you get into the car and it would warm up the car and maybe even the batteries.
Then the last and most important bit which is battery life. That is how many years will these batteries run the car. We all have laptops where the batteries have cacked after a year or two; often fairly suddenly, one moment we had a battery life and then the battery is complaining seconds after unplugging the laptop. So the car companies need to either warranty the batteries and maybe even set an eventual replacement price in stone. This way you know that in 8 years they will sell you a new set of cells for $2,000 or something. This might be a bit of a risk for the car companies but I would think that the odds are in favor of better cheaper batteries being generally available in less than 8 years.
Lastly there is nearly zero customer education. Most people don't know that most of these cars can be charged slowly with a normal outlet and that the "advanced" outlet is basically a higher amperage dryer plug. The slower charging is important as they know that they can do things such as go to the cottage and charge the car overnight.
The stupid thing is that without fixing the above they are
Vegetarianism is a religious choice and it is horrible to see that choice foisted upon people. Usually it is weirdo movie stars or musicians trying to force the crew working on their productions to do this crap; not sensible countries and their militaries. The furthest this should go is to give the soldiers a Vegetarian option and go no further.
This would make sense if Norway wasn't one of the larger oil producers in the world or was suffering from an inability to obtain meat.
Think how far this would fly if they started using Sharia Law in the Military?
I am calling all scientists out there to fudge their data and show that the moment a call exceeds 30 seconds that the plane is more likely to crash than not. Can you imagine an 8 hour flight beside some bubble brain blabbing the whole time on their phone:
"Mary said, to John that I told Sue what Jane said about Mark... Yeah I would so love to get high with him. Did you see what Mary was wearing at John's on Friday, I wouldn't be caught dead in that, it is sooooo 2012. I gave my phone to this geeky neighbour who I have friendzoned soooo hard; so anyway he put this giant battery in it so I can now talk for like 2 days straight. Anyhoo I have those new shoes, ya the ones with the red, anyway I got them and they hurt my feet so much and after I went home with that guy... no I don't know his name.. well anyway the ass made me walk down his 2 mile long driveway the next morning and now they're ruined, ya you're right I should sue him. So now I have to ask my baby daddy to buy me another pair, or I won't let him see his kid at my step-mother's. Ya I spent my whole paycheque on them. I don't know, do you know, then who knows, do you know anyone who knows someone who knows. Ya so anyway all the people on this plane are so boring, no Vogue, No Elle, Nothing. The only thing I can see is some guy near me reading something called the Eco Mist. Boring. It has a picture of that Hispanic guy who's president or something......."
The simple fact is that silverlight increases the attack space while offering me nothing. You still have to have flash (as do the vast majority) installed in order to access quite a bit of content but this is in a nice decline with HTML5, Java browser plugins are basically dead with just a few fools stuck with legacy code that they are required to use.
Plus I don't trust MS one iota. I don't have MS anything installed on any of my machines. Presently I use Mac and would love to dump even that OS but I too am trapped by some applications that restrict my OS options.
As for your numbers on silverlight security holes, that is like the past when Apple would point out that you basically didn't even need an AV tool. This was due to people going for the low hanging Windows fruit. The same applies to Silverlight; it is an also ran and is priority 200 for black-hat hackers.
As for Netflix, my guess is that the reality is one of two options. One was that their DRM requirements could not easily be met with Flash whereas MS is very much an IP driven company. Or two; in the early days of Netflix there was some sort of relationship between MS and Netflix and the decision was political. The main way that MS has increased Silverlight market share is to get large sports streaming and whatnot to use it forcing the dedicated fans to choke it down so this second guess is my favorite. At this point Netflix probably ignores MS's demands and requests but they are probably somewhat stuck with it.
My last guess is that within a year you will see them toss Silverlight.
I suspect that everyone (except MS) are extremely happy to break the chains of monitoring licenses and making sure that their accounts are paid up etc.
If I were the CFO of a company I would love to answer the call from some MSDN "certified" bunch of losers call wondering where their renewal check is and I could then tell them that they can go to hell.
But now in these post Snowden times I would be extremely wary of any corporate data where a Microsoft OS has access to my data. How much state sponsored corporate espionage has been taking place with the cooperation of MS? None, Some, Tonnes?
Any foreign company competing with politically connected US corporations on billion dollar deals should take a long hard look at any US based OS and think, "Might the US government be grabbing my data in their National Interest?"
In some countries Cisco has been seeing huge drops in sales. I suspect that there is much more of this to come as it can be hard for a huge company to just throw their network gear out the window and replace it at the drop of a hat. But I also suspect that directives have been issued that all US gear is to be gone ASAP.
This is a perfect example of why I never installed Silverlight. Adobe is sloppy enough with their programming, Microsoft tends to take it to the next level of actually hating their customers so I would love to watch Netflix on my Laptop/Desktop but instead don't. I was shocked to see that they were using Silverlight in that I though Netflix had good programmers who knew what they were doing.
The horrible thing is that they could have had a great marketing advantage by being able to say, "Our phones' OS, design, legal control, and manufacturing all take place in a country that will take your security seriously. We do not answer to the whims of US officials and will, in fact, be abusive to their requests."
This would have garnered them a nice chunk of the market.
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Personally I think that India is quite cool; but it would never enter my head in a million years to do business where any Indian official could screw things up. Maybe I am completely wrong but this is the perception of every business person I know including Indians who regularly navigate those dangerous waters.
India regularly complains that they don't get any respect from the western business world who only want to sell their products in India from afar. It makes me wonder what kind of powerhouse India could be if there wasn't this ever present threat that either a corrupt official (at any one of the 10,000 government departments) will demand a bribe, or the ever present threat that a local competitor will use officialdom to shut you out of the Indian market.
If it is this bad for outsiders how terrible is it for Indians who manage to have some success?
I had an idea for a book (that I'd probably never write) where a Canadian spy service turned out to be one of the worst offenders for international assholery. The basic premise was that nobody would think of Canada as a bunch of meddling douch-nozzles; and then damn it turns out we are.
The whole stupid thing is that if you were to add up all the value that Canada has received from our super spy stuff that it would pale in comparison to the damage that has been done to our international reputation. How many companies won't deal with us? How many countries don't view us as fairplay sorts of people? How many countries are now going to think, "If Canada is even doing it then so should we."?
If it turns out that the spies were stopping a James Bond level supervillain every month or so then it might have been worth it. But my guess is that the sum total was that other spy agencies fed crap information to us combines with their discovery that people who they knew were bad, were, in fact, bad.
But the premise of my book being that Canadian's could wander the globe un-molested (except for the 2 minutes that people thought they were Americans) is now in the crapper. Prior to recent events I suspect that a Canadian who wandered into North Korea could potentially be believed that he thought that South Korea was the one he wasn't allowed to do and then before he was released organize a mining contract with the government.
I think the physical world version is when developers build crap houses during a housing boom. Leaky roofs, crap foundations, cheap hardware, shoddy workmanship, often even crossing the line into bribing building inspectors to allow even legal corners to be cut. But in the hysteria of the boom the shoddy developer will make far far far more money than the craftsmen. The price for this crap workmanship is often only paid during the downturn when the people who bought the crap houses have a very hard time maintaining them and selling them.
So it all depends on the timing and this is where fast and shoddy is potentially an asset. If you realize what the market needs right this second and produce it right this second then you will start to scoop customers by the boatload. Then (unlike houses) you can go back and rebuild properly. I have heard that the programmers at Google complain about the crap original code that the founders did. The Twitter code was crappy ruby and then replaced. I suspect that even things like Youtube was crap but then replaced. Reddit was done in lisp and then replaced in something like 24 hours in python.
But if your product is not all about timing, say building an upgraded POS(point of sale, not piece of sh..) system for a store then craftsmanship should probably be rule one.
By better I meant more money. Many of the top websites out there have done emergency rewrites a their weak code failed under load. But I suspect that if they had carefully crafted their code "properly" from the start they would have been late to market, run out of money, or culled critical(to their success) features to meet various deadlines. The damn the torpedoes approach might not appeal to the craftsmen in many of us but if you simply use the score of how many dollars it generates then poor code has a horrible habit of scoring quite well.
I can just see the courses my school would have offered. Textbooks full of code that is bug ridden. Teachers that would not understand advanced programming and thus penalize awesome programmers that "colored outside the lines" and used advanced programming. I could see some student using a singleton instead of a global and having the teacher say "Wrong a global would have been cleaner." Even if you hate singletons, global are worse.
Then I could see the technology becoming either a buzzword bingo or really dated. So it would be intro to perl, visual basic, and power builder. Or an intro to node.js, ruby, and haskell.
But the second worst upon worst would be that companies would "freely" donate to the school system so that the kids would become little MSDN/Oracle/Salesforce drones.
The worst of worst would be that they would suck all the fun out of it; Every single drop. So instead of teaching them something relevant such as making a video game, an Arduino robot, or creating a tool for interacting with pintrest/twiter/vine etc. They would have them doing the age old command line enter your age and find out how old you are in dog years crap.
I have watched my nephews making crap in Unity3D and they are forcing themselves to learn programming. Much is copy and paste code then hammer it until it works. This is not going to create a firm foundation but if after this they took a rapid introduction to programming course that showed them how to do things correctly they would realize that many of their bad habits had a cure. But they wouldn't have to learn the underlying philosophy that makes you really grok programming which is something that most intro courses completely fail at. I have talked to many people who have just passed a university programming course and they usually don't know the difference between a float and an int. (Usually Java based courses so they should know).
I'm not saying that CS in highschool is a bad idea but that CS is for a certain type of person. You either love it or it is purely a chore. It seems that the goal is to expose tonnes of people to CS and hope that a few end up joining our little cult. So my suggestion is to create for credit computer/engineering clubs. The idea would be to have the tools and a mentor who would encourage independent study and small group projects. This way someone who has been doing Arduino assembly since grade 8 would be able to attempt something fantastic while someone else who had failed to compile Hello World and still loved it would also have a place that welcomed them. Trying to have a standard curriculum is just going to annoy everybody and only result in wasted time and tears; and maybe even a worse outcome as the person who wants to make an app is just going to get pissed off writing the usual command line garbage. Personally I would much rather make a crappy buggy app than a perfect command line thing on my first go.
A bit of Hollywood history is that the movie industry was born from the movie people wanting to get away from the abusive patents that gave control to this new and expanding industry to a few east coast barons.
So we can see what happens when you have an industry that is "protected" by patents and the identical industry that isn't.
People argue that without patents nobody would invent anything. But in a rapidly expanding and growing industry people aren't inventing for the sake of inventing but solving problems that are completely obvious in their solution the moment any halfway decent engineer stumbles upon them.
I suspect that another key problem with ethics is that many evil things are more fun to do, think about, and tell people than the boring things. If you tell people that you are an HVAC engineer they will think, "BORING!!!" yet the reality is that you make many poeples' lives more comfortable, and with good designs, save energy, and create healthy environments. But if you tell people you are the inventor of the hellfire missile or build nuclear bombs then they will go, "oooooooh"
I'm not sure there is any limit to the "coolness" of what is effectively sociopathic behavior; If you tell tech people that you are building a military robot that is designed to hunt and then jump onto the faces of the Taliban (alien style) and stuff a GPS tracker/grenade down their throat that forces them to surrender or be blown up from the inside then you will make headline news. If you develop a way to make cheap home wiring that conducts better than silver you are back to boring.
The above evil will get a few people to gasp in horror but most people will want to know more.
Now normally the defense industry goes through spasms of peace and the engineers face huge layoffs. But this time around the US is effectively doing a War on Fear which will pretty well never end. So if you can invent a tool for annihilating the boogy man then you will remain solidly employed. I you are inventing somethings solar that reduces fossil fuel use then your employment will be fitful at best.
I have seen leaked code from many very successful products. Typically it is shoddy and full of security holes (hence why it was public) yet the companies behind it were and generally are doing quite well. Personally I am a fussy about making my products solid and secure; but I hate to say it but quick and dirty makes for a better business model.
So as many people have advised, document your worries, but even better find the various security problems and come up with a solid recovery plan. Then when the day comes and things go to hell you will be able to save the day. The only thing to do with your documents is not to play the blame game ( you will lose to some MBA asshole who will take you out before you can do any damage to his career) but to be able to show the MBA looking for a scapegoat that you aren't going to be easy prey and for them to find some other person to blame.
So in the end you will be a hero, not a scapegoat, and will have all the resources to fix everything for a while at least. What you will never be is vindicated.
Theoretically in a large organization with a huge and demanding application allowing developers to be able to interface with some sort of API with whatever language they choose may seem like a very flexible solution. I would be very worried that after a few years your code base would not only include a broad spectrum of languages but even potentially a broad spectrum of versions of those languages.
I suspect that you would find yourself having to learn Haskell for one emergency and Erlang for the next.
Where a multi language compatible API would be great though is when you start to migrate your system from one language to another. If you could do it piece by piece deploying each small well tested piece before moving on to the next I would suspect that many a disaster would be avoided.
I am not saying that spotify money is enough. If anything it sounds like they are just another group exploiting artists but if I understand they are still a goldmine compared to radio. These artists are saying that they got some crappy little payment for 1 MILLION listens making it seem like they were ripped off and that 1 million is a huge number. But 1 million would be a normal number listening to a NY radio station at primetime and the same artist would be all chuffed that they are in a NY radio station's prime time rotation. But that radio station would be paying peanuts for that.
I suspect that this is why some of the more "successful" (I'm not saying good) artists just tour tour tour and can barely be bothered to politic their way in to the top 10 charts. This way they have much more control over the money. If some promoter tries to set up a concert where the artist is getting shafted then they just won't show up. Worst case contractually they will just get "laryngitis".
I have read an interesting thing about iTunes though. Many dead music libraries from decades ago suddenly became viable with iTunes. Some artists who charted in the 60's and 70's said, "I haven't had a royalty check in 15 years even though I hear my stuff on radio every now and then. But after I put my stuff on iTunes I'm now getting around $30,000 a year."
So one of the things with Spotify being ragged on by the artists might come from the fact that the numbers are presented to the artist making it clear that they aren't getting much money. Whereas their other distribution channels are much cloudier so they don't know how badly they are being screwed.
Quite simply information is power. Governments might claim (and potentially truthfully) that they won't abuse this power; but it is power that they have quite simply grabbed without much debate. On the otherhand we the people are denied much information about government with them saying that it would be a security issue to hand out much of the most powerful information. So why is it that minor nobodies with little or no oversight can go through my most personal banking, telephoning, and medical information while the most basic information such as the exact details of how government officials are spending my money are hidden.
Few if any freedom of information laws have real teeth and governments push back against them as hard as is possible with outlandish fees, redacted information, delays, byzantine application and appeals processes, and in the end no consequences if they obstruct or don't comply. Let's see what happens when the government demands information from you and you start hitting them with per page fees, redacting information, or just saying no.
I have a simple suggestion: that laws be put into place that severely limit the government's ability to gather information about us. And another set of laws that give the public pretty well open and near total access to any government record. The only records that should be "secret" are ones where the harm greatly outweighs the public good and even then there could be time limits. Two examples would be a few things involving criminal investigations such as informants, undercover officers, wiretaps, etc. The other would be individual medical records as people would otherwise be reluctant to seek treatment for embarrassing conditions or at least be honest with their doctor.
But severely limiting the government would almost certainly result in their doing an end run and using private organizations to do their spying. So the law would have to reach out and limit any organization from gathering or sharing data. A simple example that I would love to see is that a company would not be allowed to disseminate/sell data even in the aggregate that they gathered for a specific purpose beyond that purpose. So if a contest gets your name they can use it for picking a winner, not for further marketing. If the power company gets your address they can hook you up and send you bills. If the credit card companies see you make a purchase they can bill you for it but that is it. A critical part of such a law would be that a contract can not depend upon someone waving that right, nor can their be negative option waivers.
A simple way to formulate this law would be to find out the various data sources that junk mailers use and make them all illegal; that plus a bit of common sense would make for an awesome life improving law.
The day google seemed to demote experts-exchange.com was one of the best days on the internet.
One of the interesting test results is if you should avoid certain things such as opiates(due to a propensity to become addicted) , malaria, etc. You might think that you should avoid those anyway but it allows you to simply say after back surgery, "I don't want any opiate based drugs so as to avoid becoming dependent" and with travel plans you would doubly avoid countries with even fairly low levels of malaria. So Italy instead of Costa Rica. Not exactly home surgery but allows you to make your own informed choices for $99.
I can't imagine what the same bevy of tests would cost at my family doctor? I am going to throw out that it would be no less than $1,000 to end up with the same results.
I am 100% sure that this is because 23 and me are cutting out layer upon layer of the traditional health network. Cable would shut down Netflix if they could claim "It's for the children" like the health industry can.
Off the top of my head the layers cut out would include: Doctors, HMOs, Lab techs, companies that distribute the tests, the companies that make the tests, and most importantly the various government departments that deal with all these people. It is not like 23 and me are going to destroy traditional medicine but the last thing that the health industry wants are for their "customers" to grow comfortable going to cheap efficient companies for their medical needs.
I think the funny thing is that the 100,000 to 1 ratio works out about perfectly on a per minute basis; that is one accident per 100,000 minutes of operation. I think that challenger flew for a tad over 90,000 minutes. Then with Columbia they "vastly" improved safety and got it to fly for 400,000 minutes.
Bureaucrats are comfortable generating reality. To a large extent this becomes their job; if you are in charge of an environmental clean up you will move the goalposts around to match what you can do, and if you can't even meet these mutable goals you figure out a way to measure it so that the result are met. Plus you take any reports that indicate failure and "massage" them until they look good; and if the underlings who create these horrible truths won't shut up you punish them or just get rid of them.
This works well when the facts are a bit fuzzy and you are able to control the flow of information to your superiors and ideally the public. The problem is that the skillset that enables these people to survive and thrive in a bureaucracy aren't the skills required to deliver a functioning and realistic test passing product. So you have a product such as healthcare.gov which is going to be wildly exposed to the public and the scrutiny of people you can't control (the press and political opposition) and oddly enough it blows up.
People look at the hard numbers and say this is a pile of crap that doesn't work. Yet I am willing to bet two key things are happening:
One is that there are reports flowing up to the top people (who don't understand technology) that are a combination of saying that it works far better than the "detractors" are claiming while simultaniously blaming some other party with lesser abilities to communicate with said superiors.
And two that the company that won this contract is awesome at participating in this reality distorting circlejerk. I bet that the reports and other paperwork was Washington gold; the product of top-of-the-class-MBAs. People for whom facts are not only to be ignored but to be looked at with suspicion and hostility.
So the question of which development style should have been used or which technology was best are nearly moot; in that every choice would have been made based upon the criteria of "It must look good in a report"
I suspect that the only lesson learned from this in Washington is that if you love your career that you should not get involved in a project that involves a measurable end product that is delivered to the public.
The various opposition groups will probably try to score various points based upon actual facts such as cronyism and poor testing but the reality is that 5 minutes into getting power they would hand a similar project over to their insider friends and primarily demand good paperwork over an actual product.
So to prevent this type of disaster you can't look at say agile practices in software but maybe agile type practices within government itself.
I agree but the key mistake is that they are trying to build electric cars that replace cars. My theory is to build an electric car for weirdos; people who don't drive much or when they do drive are driving a very very predictable pattern that falls well within a cheaper electric. You mention that a road trip would be a 10% problem. But for a two car house with one car electric and commuting and the other for more "normal" driving this would not be a problem.
The gas turbine bump thing is a problem with larger gas turbines. Smaller ones can take advantage of things such as air bearings that are exceptional at taking bumps. But again this is where they are building normal cars with an electric twist. Jag tested a car with a 90hp turbine that was enough to sustain highway speeds. I don't want that big a thing but a turbine to get me out of trouble; hence 5hp or so. I am perfectly happy to discover that my car won't get me home unless I pull over and recharge for an hour. So I pull over and read a book. This would happen infrequently but it would be less costly than a tow and take about the same time.
Right now electric cars are for very specific people who have fairly specific needs plus they are missing critical features.
There are two sorts of people who can use a modern electric car: People who commute well within a basic battery range (less than 100km round trip) and the other are people like me who live downtown and mostly need a car to avoid using the terrible bus system or bike in bad weather.
Quite simply it is impossible to build a reasonably priced electric car that can match a gasoline car so the simple solution is to not bother. So if you make a case to the less than 100km round trip commuter that they will basically never buy gas for their commuting again then you will have their attention.
If you tell me as a very infrequent driver and generally short trip driver that I will never buy gas again then you will have my attention.
But if you lie to me and tell me that electric is basically the same as a gas car then I will call BS and you won't have my attention.
On top of all that there are a few bad design decisions. First is they keep trying to put too big a battery in the cars; this is just stupid until batteries get cheaper and better. Just meet the average commuter's needs for a round trip with margin and you will sell them a car. The next design disaster is when they try to simulate a real gas car by putting a piston engine in as in the volt. The best solution would be to have a low power gas turbine (5-10hp) that can charge the car's battery slowly. This way you eliminate range anxiety by allowing the person to realize that they don't have enough juice to complete the journey so they kick in the turbine (or automatically when they set a destination that is beyond the battery's range) which will buy more range. If the turbine doesn't provide enough immediate range the driver could pull over and get a coffee while the turbine adds a mile of range every minute or two.
Then you roof the car in solar so that the battery is charging during sunny days. For a commuter this would be great as they might use 30% of their charge getting to work and come out having recovered 10%. Then when they get home they would get an hour or two more charging not quite topping them up but reducing their electrical bill.
For an occasional user like me a solar roof might mean that my battery is nearly always charged as it should get topped off most sunny days.
Lastly there are all kinds of engineering gaps in these cars. One interesting one is heating in colder climates. In the winter around here a smaller battery would be eaten just keeping me warm, especially if I am waiting in the car. One simple solution would be to have an alcohol heater which would be simple and single purposed for keeping me warm. This would be great if you could turn it on 10 minutes before you get into the car and it would warm up the car and maybe even the batteries.
Then the last and most important bit which is battery life. That is how many years will these batteries run the car. We all have laptops where the batteries have cacked after a year or two; often fairly suddenly, one moment we had a battery life and then the battery is complaining seconds after unplugging the laptop. So the car companies need to either warranty the batteries and maybe even set an eventual replacement price in stone. This way you know that in 8 years they will sell you a new set of cells for $2,000 or something. This might be a bit of a risk for the car companies but I would think that the odds are in favor of better cheaper batteries being generally available in less than 8 years.
Lastly there is nearly zero customer education. Most people don't know that most of these cars can be charged slowly with a normal outlet and that the "advanced" outlet is basically a higher amperage dryer plug. The slower charging is important as they know that they can do things such as go to the cottage and charge the car overnight.
The stupid thing is that without fixing the above they are
I mean that the vegetarianism itself is the religion. I would very much doubt that this is a policy dreamed up by someone who eats meat.
Vegetarianism is a religious choice and it is horrible to see that choice foisted upon people. Usually it is weirdo movie stars or musicians trying to force the crew working on their productions to do this crap; not sensible countries and their militaries. The furthest this should go is to give the soldiers a Vegetarian option and go no further.
This would make sense if Norway wasn't one of the larger oil producers in the world or was suffering from an inability to obtain meat.
Think how far this would fly if they started using Sharia Law in the Military?
I am calling all scientists out there to fudge their data and show that the moment a call exceeds 30 seconds that the plane is more likely to crash than not. Can you imagine an 8 hour flight beside some bubble brain blabbing the whole time on their phone:
"Mary said, to John that I told Sue what Jane said about Mark... Yeah I would so love to get high with him. Did you see what Mary was wearing at John's on Friday, I wouldn't be caught dead in that, it is sooooo 2012. I gave my phone to this geeky neighbour who I have friendzoned soooo hard; so anyway he put this giant battery in it so I can now talk for like 2 days straight. Anyhoo I have those new shoes, ya the ones with the red, anyway I got them and they hurt my feet so much and after I went home with that guy... no I don't know his name.. well anyway the ass made me walk down his 2 mile long driveway the next morning and now they're ruined, ya you're right I should sue him. So now I have to ask my baby daddy to buy me another pair, or I won't let him see his kid at my step-mother's. Ya I spent my whole paycheque on them. I don't know, do you know, then who knows, do you know anyone who knows someone who knows. Ya so anyway all the people on this plane are so boring, no Vogue, No Elle, Nothing. The only thing I can see is some guy near me reading something called the Eco Mist. Boring. It has a picture of that Hispanic guy who's president or something......."
The simple fact is that silverlight increases the attack space while offering me nothing. You still have to have flash (as do the vast majority) installed in order to access quite a bit of content but this is in a nice decline with HTML5, Java browser plugins are basically dead with just a few fools stuck with legacy code that they are required to use.
Plus I don't trust MS one iota. I don't have MS anything installed on any of my machines. Presently I use Mac and would love to dump even that OS but I too am trapped by some applications that restrict my OS options.
As for your numbers on silverlight security holes, that is like the past when Apple would point out that you basically didn't even need an AV tool. This was due to people going for the low hanging Windows fruit. The same applies to Silverlight; it is an also ran and is priority 200 for black-hat hackers.
As for Netflix, my guess is that the reality is one of two options. One was that their DRM requirements could not easily be met with Flash whereas MS is very much an IP driven company. Or two; in the early days of Netflix there was some sort of relationship between MS and Netflix and the decision was political. The main way that MS has increased Silverlight market share is to get large sports streaming and whatnot to use it forcing the dedicated fans to choke it down so this second guess is my favorite. At this point Netflix probably ignores MS's demands and requests but they are probably somewhat stuck with it.
My last guess is that within a year you will see them toss Silverlight.
I suspect that everyone (except MS) are extremely happy to break the chains of monitoring licenses and making sure that their accounts are paid up etc.
If I were the CFO of a company I would love to answer the call from some MSDN "certified" bunch of losers call wondering where their renewal check is and I could then tell them that they can go to hell.
But now in these post Snowden times I would be extremely wary of any corporate data where a Microsoft OS has access to my data. How much state sponsored corporate espionage has been taking place with the cooperation of MS? None, Some, Tonnes?
Any foreign company competing with politically connected US corporations on billion dollar deals should take a long hard look at any US based OS and think, "Might the US government be grabbing my data in their National Interest?"
In some countries Cisco has been seeing huge drops in sales. I suspect that there is much more of this to come as it can be hard for a huge company to just throw their network gear out the window and replace it at the drop of a hat. But I also suspect that directives have been issued that all US gear is to be gone ASAP.
This is a perfect example of why I never installed Silverlight. Adobe is sloppy enough with their programming, Microsoft tends to take it to the next level of actually hating their customers so I would love to watch Netflix on my Laptop/Desktop but instead don't. I was shocked to see that they were using Silverlight in that I though Netflix had good programmers who knew what they were doing.
The horrible thing is that they could have had a great marketing advantage by being able to say, "Our phones' OS, design, legal control, and manufacturing all take place in a country that will take your security seriously. We do not answer to the whims of US officials and will, in fact, be abusive to their requests."
This would have garnered them a nice chunk of the market.
That is gone now.